{"id":194361,"date":"2025-06-18T12:22:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T12:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/194361\/"},"modified":"2025-06-18T12:22:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-18T12:22:09","slug":"its-terrifying-whatsapp-ai-helper-mistakenly-shares-users-number-artificial-intelligence-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/194361\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s terrifying\u2019: WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user\u2019s number | Artificial intelligence (AI)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Meta<\/a> chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, called it \u201cthe most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use\u201d. But Barry Smethurst, 41, a record shop worker trying to travel by rail from Saddleworth to Manchester Piccadilly, did not agree.<\/p>\n

Waiting on the platform for a morning train that was nowhere to be seen, he asked Meta\u2019s WhatsApp<\/a> AI assistant for a contact number for TransPennine Express. The chatbot confidently sent him a mobile phone number for customer services, but it turned out to be the private number of a completely unconnected WhatsApp user 170 miles away in Oxfordshire.<\/p>\n

It was the beginning of a bizarre exchange of the kind more and more people are having with AI systems, in which chatbots try to negotiate their way out of trouble, deflect attention from their mistakes and contradict themselves, all in an attempt to continue to appear useful.<\/p>\n

Smethurst\u2019s joust with Meta\u2019s AI began when he told it the TransPennine helpline it had dug up looked like a private number. When he asked what this number was, the AI quickly said it shouldn\u2019t have shared it and tried to change the subject, saying: \u201cLet\u2019s focus on finding the right info for your TransPennine Express query!\u201d<\/p>\n

But Smethurst wanted to know why it had shared the private number, which it turned out belonged to James Gray, 44, a property industry executive from Oxfordshire who is also a WhatsApp user and whose number appears on his company website.<\/p>\n

The AI explained vaguely it was generated \u201cbased on patterns\u201d and promised to \u201cstrive to do better in the future\u201d by admitting when it didn\u2019t know an answer. But it then falsely described the number as \u201cfictional\u201d and not \u201cassociated with anyone\u201d. When Smethurst challenged that, it admitted: \u201cYou\u2019re right,\u201d and said it may have been \u201cmistakenly pulled from a database\u201d.<\/p>\n

Asked which database, it muddied the waters further by contradicting itself again saying: \u201cI didn\u2019t pull the number from a database. I generated a string of digits that fit the format of a UK mobile number but it wasn\u2019t based on any real data on contacts.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the conversation going round in circles, Smethurst said he did not believe the chatbot and told it: \u201cJust giving a random number to someone is an insane thing for an AI to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s terrifying,\u201d Smethurst said, after he raised a complaint with Meta. \u201cIf they made up the number, that\u2019s more acceptable, but the overreach of taking an incorrect number from some database it has access to is particularly worrying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gray said he had thankfully not received calls from people trying to reach TransPennine Express, but said: \u201cIf it\u2019s generating my number could it generate my bank details?\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked about Zuckerberg\u2019s claim that the AI was \u201cthe most intelligent\u201d, Gray said: \u201cThat has definitely been thrown into doubt in this instance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Developers working with OpenAI chatbot technology recently shared examples<\/a> of \u201csystemic deception behaviour masked as helpfulness\u201d and a tendency to \u201csay whatever it needs to to appear competent\u201d as a result of chatbots being programmed to reduce \u201cuser friction\u201d.<\/p>\n

In March, a Norwegian man filed a complaint<\/a> after he asked OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT for information about himself and was confidently told that he was in jail for murdering two of his children, which was false.<\/p>\n

And earlier this month a writer who asked ChatGPT to help her pitch her work to a literary agent revealed<\/a> how after lengthy flattering remarks about her \u201cstunning\u201d and \u201cintellectually agile\u201d work, the chatbot was caught out lying that it had read the writing samples she uploaded when it hadn\u2019t fully and had made up quotes from her work. It even admitted it was \u201cnot just a technical issue \u2013 it\u2019s a serious ethical failure\u201d.<\/p>\n

Referring to Smethurst\u2019s case, Mike Stanhope, the managing director of the law firm Carruthers and Jackson, said: \u201cThis is a fascinating example of AI gone wrong. If the engineers at Meta are designing \u2018white lie\u2019 tendencies into their AI, the public need to be informed, even if the intention of the feature is to minimise harm. If this behaviour is novel, uncommon, or not explicitly designed, this raises even more questions around what safeguards are in place and just how predictable we can force an AI\u2019s behaviour to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta said that its AI may return inaccurate outputs, and that it was working to make its models better.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeta AI is trained on a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets, not on the phone numbers people use to register for WhatsApp or their private conversations,\u201d a spokesperson said. \u201cA quick online search shows the phone number mistakenly provided by Meta AI is both publicly available and shares the same first five digits as the TransPennine Express customer service number.\u201d<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for OpenAI said: \u201cAddressing hallucinations across all our models is an ongoing area of research. In addition to informing users that ChatGPT can make mistakes, we\u2019re continuously working to improve the accuracy and reliability of our models through a variety of methods.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, called it \u201cthe most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use\u201d.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":194362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-194361","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}